By the year of 1998 I had devoured all I could find about Paganism. The Country was a different place back then. Everyone seemed to always be angry. We had just come out of the time period of Apartheid. We were moving forward yet somehow no one was happy about this. Everyone feared everyone else and everywhere you went certain people were associated with certain wrongs. Whites, Black and Colourds, no one was safe from each other. Well at least in the minds of the people this was very true.
Prior to 1994 you could not find a book on Paganism in any bookshop. That’s only 18 years ago. That’s how young this country really is. We knew we were different. We didn’t go to church, we didn’t believe in the one true God. We loved the moon and knew that we had past lives and that the two of us were connected in at least two previous lifetimes. And so we believed in many other things that Pagans believe in. But we didn’t know what to call it or that we should even call it something.
It is roughly in this time of serious oppression, oppression against race and sex and sexuality, oppression of religion, freedom as whole and even our thoughts, that a friend of my mother brought a Pagan book from over seas.
Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner – Scott Cunnigham
We obviously could not buy the book and so we copied it. Two copies. One for each of us. We devoured the book. Read it over and over. Also we did not have internet access at home and research was limited. Not to long after that mother got her hands on another book. Goddess knows where she got it.
The Complete Book of Witchcraft – Raymond Buckland.
Not too long after that a shop was discovered in city centre. The shops was Wizards. They still exist today but they have moved from Pickbell Parkade to Stadium on Main in Claremont. They had Pagan books. Hellishly expensive for us, since we were never wealthy people who had money to just throw around. But slowly but surely we built up a few books.
So then a few years after that in 1998 in mid April I was sitting on my bed and teaching to people about Paganism/Wicca. I had no idea if what I was doing was correct or that I was even good at it, all I knew is that I knew that this is what I truly wanted to do. This felt right and somehow it felt familiar. None of that has changed. I still don’t think that I am a particularly wonderful teacher. But I love doing it! The course back then was about 24 pages long. Now just module 3 of First Degree is 42 pages. It’s 14 years later. Next year it will be 15 years. At the end of this year I am turning 30. So next year this time I have quite literally given half of my life in service to my Goddess, my God and my Community. Sometimes it feels like less and then sometimes it feels like so much more. But I don’t regret it. Not a single day of it. I look at photo’s of the students and myself, they look truly happy and as cliché as what this may sound, that makes me happy.
Mwah!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment